VOWEL

Objective Vowels are the center of syllables while formant structures are one of the most important acoustic characteristics of speech sounds that help in their articulatory and perceptual aspects. For-mants represent the shape and size of the vocal tract. There exist trivial differences between the vocal tracts of different people due to which the formant structures of a vowel in one person are different from another person. Towards the end of the 20 th century, advances in acoustic science and production of digital tools introduced voice acoustical characteristics analysis as another parameter of sound analysis. These voice acoustical characteristics analyses lead to better assessment of the voices. Effective treatment of speech disorders depends on accurate diagnosis by the speech-language pathologist. The relationship between the first three formants is the main component of perceptual categorization by the listener. Therefore, the aim of the current study is to determine and compare Persian vowel frequency of first, second and third formants in bilingual adults. Materials & Methods A cross-sectional study was performed on 50 participants (25 males and 25 females) aged 18 to 24 years. Bilingual students from Tabriz University of Medical Sciences were selected by an easy and non randomized sampling method, where the average of the first, second and the third formant frequencies for each of the six Persian vowels were taken into consideration. Data collection involved a demographic questionnaire (age, gender, bilingualism, and diseases related to the speech-breathing mechanism), the consent form, a computer equipped with PRATT Software and one sound recorder set. The data were analyzed using SPSS V. 18 software. When the data were normally distributed, independent t-test was used; otherwise, Mann-Whitney test was used. Results This study showed that the maximum and minimum values of F1 in the males and females are /ae/ and /i/ vowels. The maximum and minimum values of F2 are /i/ and /o/ vowels in both the sexes, whereas, the maximum and minimum values of F3 are /i/ and /ae/ vowels in males and /i/ and /a/ vowels in the females. Conclusion According to the results of this study, / ae/ and /i/ vowels in both the sexes are the most open and closest. /i/ and /o/ vowels in both the sexes are the most front and most back vowels. The most spread vowel in males and females is /i/ but the roundest vowel is /ae/ in the males and /a/ vowel in females.

Eastern Andalusian Spanish deletes coda consonants and the effects of such deletions have been widely studied. However, this has been done almost exclusively for /s/. Furthermore, no study has considered Eastern Andalusian speakers with articulation disorders. The present paper explores the consequences of /s/, /r/, and /θ/ deletion on preceding vowels in Eastern Andalusian speakers with articulation disorders. The vowels from eight speakers with articulation disorders are analysed in word-final position and before underlying /-s/, /-r/, and /-θ/. Acoustic and statistical analyses show that speakers with an articulation disorder do not simply delete word-final consonants, as posited in the literature for these type of speakers, but they also display lowering and fronting/backing, which is typical in this variety of Spanish. The results from the analyses of the 524 vowels from the present study are compared to data of speakers not affected by articulation disorders from the literatur...

Eastern Andalusian Spanish deletes all coda consonants; yet, coda deletion analyses have focused on /-s/. The acoustic and statistical analyses of 317 tokens of /u/ in 24 Eastern Andalusian speakers confirm that the differences in quality between word-final /u/ and /u/ preceding deleted /-s/, /-r/, and /-θ/ are statistically significant. Furthermore, /-s/, /-r/, and /-θ/ deletion changes the quality of a preceding /u/ in different degrees but the difference of quality between these three realisations of /u/ is not statistically significant. Likewise, a perception experiment confirms that Eastern Andalusian speakers can identify whether or not /u/ is followed by an underlying /-s/, /-r/, or /-θ/; however, they cannot identify the deleted consonant.

Unstressed vowels are somewhat centralized (even full vowels such as the second in “city, taco"), reducing their acoustic distinctiveness. The current work compares listeners' perception of stressed and unstressed vowels in English and Dutch. The data come from two large projects on native listeners' perception of all possible diphones (CV, VC, CC, and VV sequences, all vowels stressed and unstressed) in English and Dutch. These datasets provide information about listeners' uptake of perceptual cues over time that is comparable across the two languages. Both groups perceived unstressed vowels less accurately than stressed, but this effect was far larger for English. English listeners showed a very large stress effect for lax vowels and a moderate effect for other vowels, while the Dutch listeners showed effects that were small and largely restricted to /a/. Dutch listeners may be able to identify unstressed vowels better than English listeners because the stressed-unstressed distinction has more informational value in Dutch than in English. However, both languages showed a larger stress effect just before a following consonant. This suggests that consonantal coarticulation obscures the quality of unstressed vowels in both languages. Thus, perception of stressed vs unstressed vowels demonstrates both language specificity and cross-language commonality.

The Tangsa language belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. It is spoken by the Tangsa people of Myanmar and North-eastern India. This language is recognized as an underdeveloped language, though it has a great deal of speakers both in India and Myanmar, especially in the Trans-Border areas. In this paper it is an attempt to find out the basic phonological features of vowels of the Tangsa language. The premises that I pursued to establish the phonemic inventory and their distributions are – • Listing the suspicious pairs of sounds from collected data. • Phonetic interpretation. • Phonetic similarity. There are only six vowels in Tangsa language and five of them have obtained short and long distinction. Vowel length may not enable identification of any individual vowel, but does help the listener to distinguish spectrally similar vowels or place vowels in large categories. That’s why vowel length study is played a significant rule to study in such languages.

Nesse trabalho, buscamos responder a pergunta se a manipulação da zona de transição consoante-vogal (CV) no sinal acústico provoca efeito na percepção de obstruintes e das vogais [a], [i], [u], no PB. Nossa objetivo foi avaliar o efeito da manipulação dessa zona de transição CV na percepção de obstruintes e vogais. Realizamos manipulação do sinal acústico e aplicamos tarefas de percepção com estímulos original e manipulado (corte da zona de transição das obstruintes para as vogais) com vistas a avaliar a taxa de recuperabilidade das obstruintes e das vogais [a,i,u]. Nossos resultados mostram que a manipulação da zona de transição CV pode alterar a percepção de traços de sonoridade, ponto e modo de articulação das obstruintes, ao passo que essa mesma manipulação não provoca nenhum efeito na percepção das vogais. Nossa hipótese foi parcialmente comprovada haja vista que não observamos alteração na percepção das vogais, somente na percepção das obstruintes.

Literature shows that not much is known about the prosodic systems in Ekegusii, a Bantu language spoken by about 2.2 million people in south western Kenya. This paper presents an analysis of vowel compensatory lengthening in Ekegusii. Synchronic evidence for hiatus resolution strategies is provided in order to describe the vowels that are lengthened compensatorily and determine the morphological processes that trigger compensatory lengthening in Ekegusii. Guided by native speaker intuition and triangulation by other native speakers, data in the form of nominals and verbals were elicited from four Ekegusii texts and qualitatively analysed for emerging patterns. Findings revealed that all the seven basic Ekegusii vowels undergo compensatory lengthening when their phonetic environments are altered. Vowel compensatory lengthening is brought out as a surface realisation of the interaction of morphemes through the morphological process of prefixation. The lengthening is further seen as a ...

Our study deals with the durational structure of Italian words with a medial geminate or singleton consonant (e.g., palla “ball” vs. pala “shovel”). Specifically, we investigated the duration of the word-initial consonant (e.g., [p]) and found that the onset consonant was longer in geminate than in singleton words. A comparison to German word pairs with a vowel length contrast in the first syllable (e.g., bitten “please” vs. bieten “bed”) showed no such duration increase for the word-initial consonant [b]. On the basis of previous studies on long-distance anticipatory effects, we argue that the strength of the geminate articulation in Italian is already foreshadowed in the word-initial consonant, whereas the German vowel length contrast does not lead to such anticipatory duration differences. Our results hence provide evidence for a distinction between consonantal and vocalic subsystems for a different set of data.

The Tangsa language belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. It is spoken by the Tangsa people of Myanmar and North-eastern India. This language is recognized as an underdeveloped language, though it has a great deal of speakers both in India and Myanmar, especially in the Trans-Border areas. In this paper it is an attempt to find out the basic phonological features of vowels of the Tangsa language. The premises that I pursued to establish the phonemic inventory and their distributions are – • Listing the suspicious pairs of sounds from collected data. • Phonetic interpretation. • Phonetic similarity. There are only six vowels in Tangsa language and five of them have obtained short and long distinction. Vowel length may not enable identification of any individual vowel, but does help the listener to distinguish spectrally similar vowels or place vowels in large categories. That’s why vowel length study is played a significant rule to study in such languages.

... vowel should appear after word-final -st in colloquial Latin words is not all that surprising, particularly when considered in light of a sound change that simplified word-final -st to -s. Consider, for example, the spell-ing of the preposition post, 'after', as POS in graffiti at Pompeii: ...

A number of authors have argued that sonority differences among vowels may interact with weight-sensitive stress placement (e.g. Kenstowicz 1994, 1997; de Lacy 2006). In previous work on sonority-sensitivity, variable stress placement has usually been assumed. In this paper, I examine the role of sonority in Uyghur, a language with fixed stress. I argue that sonority is encoded as a weight distinction in the language, which drives asymmetric lengthening of word-final high vowels. I demonstrate that a mora-based analysis also offers insight into medial vowel raising in the language, and sketch out an Optimality theoretic account of the data. Findings from this study support the recent claim made by Shih & de Lacy (2019) that sonority differences are only indirectly available to the grammar in the form of weight distinctions.

In this study I explore the phonological behavior of the hypocoristic suffix /-oʃ/-/iʃ/ in Turkish. Such a suffix is common to many of the Balkan languages. Turkish differs in its introduction of the front vowel variant of the suffix, presumably to satisfy the vowel harmony requirements in Turkish for backness and rounding in high vowels. However, in spite of the potentially alternating suffix allomorphs, collection of naturalistic data as well as of elicited survey data reveals that the majority of nickname outputs are disharmonic. I conclude that the Turkish data provides further evidence for Ito and Mester’s (2009) key insight that different strata of the lexicon may operate according to different rules/constraint rankings. However, the Turkish data is not consistent with their specific faithfulness-based approach. The hypocoristic lexical stratum exhibits a greater number of vowel harmony violations, but not due to more faithfulness to vowel inputs/underlying forms. Rather, the ...

Previous research has acknowledged the effect of prosody on inter-gestural coordination, but specifically the effect of tones is still understudied. This paper has a two-fold purpose. First, it aims to explore effects of the Swedish word accents on word-initial consonant–vowel (CV) coarticulation. Second, it aims to revisit the existing evidence for tonal integration. Based on Articulatory Phonology, it has been suggested that tones – in tone languages – are integrated in the gestural organization of a syllable-initial CV sequence in the same manner as would an additional consonant (CCV), indicated by a time lag between the gestural onsets of the C and the V gesture (CV onset time lag). However, we argue that the existing evidence is inconclusive, because previous cross-linguistic research has used small-scale data sets (one to seven speakers), and we still lack a well-grounded consensus on how gestural onsets are to be measured. This study uses Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) ...

The nature of the links between speech production and perception has been the subject of longstanding debate. The present study investigated the articulatory parameter of tongue height and the acoustic F1-F0 difference for the phonological distinction of vowel height in American English front vowels. Multiple repetitions of /i, ɪ, e, ε, æ/ in [(h)Vd] sequences were recorded in seven adult speakers. Articulatory (ultrasound) and acoustic data were collected simultaneously to provide a direct comparison of variability in vowel production in both domains. Results showed idiosyncratic patterns of articulation for contrasting the three front vowel pairs /i-ɪ/, /e-ε/ and /ε-æ/ across subjects, with the degree of variability in vowel articulation comparable to that observed in the acoustics for all seven participants. However, contrary to what was expected, some speakers showed reversals for tongue height for /ɪ/-/e/ that was also reflected in acoustics with F1 higher for /ɪ/ than for /e/....

Gong Hwang-Cherng in two papers (1980, 1995) collected a number of cognate sets among Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese. This paper reexamines these cognate sets (base on Gong 1995) using a six vowel version of Old Chinese, specifically the Baxter-Sagart system. In light of six vowel theory it is possible both to be more confident about some cognate sets and possible to reject or revise others.

This study focuses on phonemic vowel quantity differentiation in 3 pairs of short versus long vowels (/i, i:, o, o:, u, u:/) by 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old monolingual Hungarian-speaking children. We hypothesized that there would be vowel quantity and vowel quality differences and also a trend toward greater vowel differentiation as children aged. Method. Participants included 3 groups of monolingual Hungarian-speaking children: 5-year-olds (n=6), 6-year-olds (n=7), and 7-year-olds (n=14) recruited from Hungarian public schools. The participants had typical cognitive skills, speech, language, and hearing within normal limits per parent and teacher report. Audio recordings were collected via conversational samples as the children interacted with an experimenter, discussing favorite pastimes, everyday lives, or favorite stories. Vowels were analyzed using PRAAT 5.0 (Boersma & Weenink, 2015) except final vowels and distorted productions or substitutions. Results. There were statistically si...